Written for the Five Years Later challenge at Dickensblog, this is set five years after the end of A Tale of Two Cities.

Disclaimer: I own none of these characters.

The Stone

The stone had been placed in a quiet corner of an old London churchyard, near a side street too narrow for carriages. There were tall old trees scattered about the place, where leaves rustled in the breeze and birds sang, but in that corner there was a little clear space where the sunlight could fall through.

It was a simple white stone, bearing only a name, a date, and a line from Scripture: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. No one was buried there; it was simply a memorial.

Someone had planted a rosebush there, and it thrived in the sunny spot, bearing fragrant loads of white blossoms summer after summer. The young golden-haired girl who frequented the place would often take one to put in her room at home.

The girl came sometimes with her parents and grandfather and young brother, sometimes only with her deaf old nurse. When no one was looking, she would rest her cheek against the stone for a moment, and close her eyes, and whisper to it, just as she had once whispered her childish secrets to the quiet, kind man with the unhappy eyes.

Her parents came sometimes together, sometimes alone. Her mother would tend the rosebush and tidy the grassy little corner with hands as gentle as if she touched a living person, seeing it all through a mist of tears. Her father often would come in the early mornings, and passersby might have seen his solitary figure kneeling there with both hands over his face, and his shoulders shaking.

Sometimes an old man in brown would come, and say a prayer, and rest his hand on the stone briefly before turning away. Sometimes a rather younger man with spiky black hair, passing that way, would slow his step as he came near, and pull off his cap, and look at the stone with a respect unusual on his rough countenance, until he was past.

And sometimes a broad, red-faced man, huffing and puffing by on his way to this or that tavern, would give a start of remembrance as his eye fell upon the stone, and draw away a little as if seized with superstitious dread, and mutter to himself with a dazed look, "We-e-e-ll, I never would have thought Syd had it in him!"

And then it would be peaceful again, with only the breeze and the soft chirping of the birds to break the silence.